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THE JUST MAGISTRATE, THE REPRESENTATIVE STATESMAN, THE PRACTICAL 
PHILANTHROPIST. 

EULOGY 

BY 

^LEX. H. BULLOCK. 



Kx^^SB^aav 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN: 

THE JUST MAGISTRATE, THE REPRESENTATIVE STATESMAJS, 
THE PRACTICAL PHILANTHROPIST. 

ADDRESS 

BY 

^LEX. H. bullock:, 

u 
Before the City Coimcil and Citizens of Worcester, 

JUNE 1, 1865. 



WOECESTEK: 
PRINTED BY CHARLES HAMILTON, 



PALLADIUM OFFICE. 






'•^. o. 



-s^ 



In City Councii,, June 1st, 1865. 

Resolyed, That the unanimous thanks of the City Council are 
hereby tendered- to the Hon. Alexandek H. BuiiLOCK for his 
able and eloquent Eulogy upon the Life and Services of the late 
Pkesident Lincoln, delivered, at the request of the Council, in 
Mechanics Hall this day, and that he be requested to furnish a 
copy for publication. 

A copy. Attest, 

SAMUEL SMITH, City Clerk. 




Vrr,.,.^u-^.r.>- 



EULOGY. 



TT would be a painful suppression of one of the 
-^ finest of human instincts and an unbecoming dis- 
regard of the official proclamation of the chief magis- 
trate, if this city were not among the foremost to 
accord its voice to the funeral cry of the nation. 
Never before, in high joy or deep grief, has the nor- 
mal simplicity of America given way to such pageant 
grandeur. The great fountains of public sorrow have 
been broken up, and a whole people have turned out 
to herald their President returning in silence to the 
dust of the prairie. I look back over forty cen- 
turies for the like of this. My eye discerns no fit 
resemblance in anything which the conceits of heathen 
mythology have transmitted, — not in that mythical 
sympathy of the Tiber for Marcellus, fortunate 
recipient of such honor, — nor in the many memorial 
Italian marbles and temples — nor in all the tasteful 



pomp which has conducted French khigs to their 
imperial sleep, and has made their capital a vast 
lettered monument to its one great departed, — nor in 
the drum-beat, and cathedral service, and royal guard, 
which have escorted English monarchs from the 
palace to the Abbey. The earliest and Jatest age 
alone meet now in comparison of mournful pageantry. 
The Orient and the West, the third of Hebrew 
patriarchs and the sixteenth President, four thousand 
years apart, are pictured before us to-day in the same 
spectacle and lesson of a nation following a just and 
true ruler to his tomb. 

I do not suppose that in all the intervening period, 
fretted and gilded as it has been with art and culture, 
anything like the passage of the herald-corpse of 
Jacob from his death-bed to the field and cave of his 
fathers, in public turn-out, and general lamentation, 
and sincerity of grief, has occurred before until now. 
To the two thousand dependants of that deceased, to 
all those sent forth by his premier-son, the most 
munificent of the line of Egyptian kings ordered all 
the public men of his country to report for additional 
escort on the long and patient and solemn march. 
Chariots and horsemen, men and maidens, the grim 
visages of age and the dusky beauty of youth, in 
lengthened procession, with palms, and music, and 
benediction, in behalf of that early world paid the 
last tribute to a great and just benefactor, to a builder 



of empire. Measuring the days by their solemn tramp 
and their halts for local condolence, the swarthy col- 
umn moved on over two hundred miles, and laid their 
treasured hero in the august depository of the first 
and second of his line. 

That oriental retinue of bereavement and sublimity 
has been matched and eclipsed within this last lunar 
month. Dying without the consciousness but amid 
all the pathos of his Eastern exemplar and progenitor, 
the foremost man of this western world has been 
carried to his rural rest beyond the mountains and 
near the great river. Awhile he lay in state at the 
capital where he fell, that all classes might gather 
about, to learn the lessons of historical providence 
and witness the presence of God. His dust, garnered 
beneath richest canopies, preceded by raven waving 
plumes, and flanked by reverse arms of the flower 
youth of the land, has been borne on triumphal route 
through the chief cities of a continent. The Monu- 
mental City opened her gates in love, which four 
years before would have closed them against him, if 
she had known his coming. Independence Hall 
struck its bell, and the dismal undulations spread 
through half-a-million of hearts as he passed by. 
The great Emporium of the North, which had made 
a jest of much of his life in office, bowed as a unit, 
like a stricken child, and paid such honors to his 
passing shade as no where have been witnessied on 



6 



the earth. Still onward and westward, a thousand 
miles yet to go, surrounded by vast throngs, all and 
everywhere reverential, all and everywhere casting 
choicest flowers upon the pathway of the dead, — as if 
twenty millions had assembled to make ovation before 
the corporeal symbol of a benefactor — your President 
was taken to his last abode, where he shall rest till 
the dead shall rise at the call of the archangel. 

The first shock of our calamity, the deep sensation 
of horror which pervaded all our hearts when the 
" couriers of the air " told us at midnight how 
suddenly and in what manner President Lincoln had 
a few hours before been snatched away, has now 
subsided, and we naturally pause and deliberate upon 
those qualities of character and service, which, in the 
apparent judgment of this country, have already 
assigned him a place only second in the long lineage 
of its magistrates. However simple this analysis may 
seem, it falls entirely outside the common range of 
our study of public men and events, and does not 
belong to the usual analogies of biography or history. 
It would be scarcely more ii:rational to compare the 
developments and stages through which we have just 
passed with any or all the unlike periods before, than 
to measure him who has been the central figure in 
these civic and martial achievements by the personal- 
ities of the past. He will be known and judged by 
the next age, not indeed without regard to his abstract 



quality, but more conspicuously and vividly as the one 
man, who, in the unfolding of the panorama of these 
four years, everywhere appears in front and in chief. 
Under the limitations of a single Presidential term he 
must pass to his place among critics and annalists ; 
but that Presidential term was enough to have en- 
circled an historic generation in other ages, and to 
have circumscribed the life-long renown of other 
statesmen. Safely then may we trust him to that 
judgment which shall fall upon his own brief 
career of rule. Never any man, without public 
thought or remembrance of his youth, or early life, 
or disciplinary training, has mounted so quickly to 
the empyrean of fame. Think, for example, in what 
manner we usually estimate Napoleon or Washington. 
Their distinction dates from the beginning. The 
genius of Napoleon is nearly the same to us whether 
we remember him as a child playing with a cannon, 
or as a youth in the Academy, or at twenty-eight 
dazzling the nations with his unprecedented victories. 
Washington the youth is familiar to our school boys, 
appears great in the French war, only greater in the 
Revolutionary and Constitutional period which 
followed. But here is a plain man, since April 
opened, gone into the alcoves of all generations to 
come and of every race, as to all of his life save the 
last five years unknown to half his countrymen and 
to the whole world beside. Such and so exceptional 



is our country and our time, such and so exceptional 
is Abraham Lincoln. 

And yet he had a childhood and a youth. In that 
which I call the first stage of his life, ending when 
he settled down as a lawyer in Springfield, I think we 
may see that fitting, that preparation, that nascent 
destination, which was the providential prelude to the 
ultimate work. Cast into a sparsely inhabited wild 
at eight years, fulfilling the measure of maternal 
ambition when at ten he could read the sacred volume, 
exercising his first conscious power in writing to his 
mother's traveling preacher to come and preach over 
her grave, writing letters for the neighbors, attending 
the first school in that country clad in buckskin, only 
too happy at length when he could count as his prop- 
erty a copy of Bunyan and J^sop, a life of Washing- 
ton and Clay, behold him whose death forty-five years 
later brought autograph letters from every crowned 
head of Europe. His library might have been larger, 
but could it have been better 1 To his apprehension 
of the Divine Word, learned when that was the only 
volume in the cabin, we may owe the Cromwell-like 
second Inaugural, which was only half appreciated 
by his countrymen until the praise of it came from 
the other side of the water. Did a man ever reflect 
better the light of youthful studies, than the President 
reflected ^sop and Bunyan? No books are more 
likely to be remembered than they ; Cowper said that 



his child-readings of the Pilgrim's Progress would 
abide with him till memory should perish. And I 
confess it is to me a grateful fancy, in looking back 
for the formative influences in the life of Lincoln, to 
perceive in these two masterpieces of inventive and 
natural conception such sources of thought and 
impression as would be best calculated to produce 
that combination, which he so remarkably illustrated, 
and which was not unrequisite for our time, the 
Puritan and the Hoosier. Then we are to remember 
that in this school of Western life, with books so few 
but so good, he acquired what Mr. Burke would call 
" the rustic, manly, home-bred sense of this country," 
— to have polished whose ingenuous roughness would 
have cost us half the power he has had during this 
war over the mass of his citizens. They have liked 
him all the better, that his wisdom and speech were 
elementary and enabled him to speak directly to their 
hearts. They have liked him so much the more, that 
he did not pretend to be learned, while they knew 
him to be original and wise. Paucity of opportunities 
in youth favored modesty in high position. How 
many members of Parliament, asked an English jour- 
nal, would imitate the modest honesty of the President 
and acknowledge that they had never read all parts of 
Shakespeare 1 But he understood and remembered 
all that he had read. 

And now, before he opens his office of law, we 



10 

catch a glimpse of the young man of nineteen floating 
as super-cargo on a flat-boat to New Orleans. It was 
his last act of rusticity and adventure. He was now 
unconsciously completing that democratic type of 
character which in its subsequent expansion and use 
has contributed so largely to save the union of these 
States. It was indeed a typical enterprise, for that 
voyage represented the unity of interest and welfare 
which connects the North-west with the Gulf, and 
all the States together from the Crescent round to 
Malabar. Upon his return he would enter the gates 
of productive life, how eventful he then knew not, 
nor any one of you. Suppose that in one of those 
transition hours, as he was borne lazily on the great 
currents and by the solemn forests, his unlettered mind 
rapt in the rhapsodies of the Prophets, or the dreams 
of Bunyan, or the wit of .^sop, or the grandeur of 
Washington, the angel of this dedicated youth had 
raised the curtain and revealed to him, that before he 
should pass the ordinary prime of life he should be 
elevated to the highest trust of this empire, lifted on 
the shoulders of the people in ecstacy at the thought 
his own words had kindled of making it all free, — 
that under his presiding the issues of life and death 
to this Union should be unrolled on every field of a 
continental war, — that he himself should sit in control 
over larger armies than Europe north or south had 
ever seen, — that his hand should touch the electric 



11 



wire which should awake four millions of the children 
of men to liberty and immortality, — that the govern- 
ment of his country should at last be sealed in his 
own blood to eternal security and glory, and that he, 
almost yet young, should return to sleep with his 
fathers, leaving to both hemispheres a name that 
shall be hailed with that of Washington whose history 
he was even then reading, till time shall be no more ! 
He would have fallen prostrate before the vision ! 
And yet under the beneficence of our institutions if 
this was to happen at all it was as likely to happen 
to him as to any other, and he lived to behold it, and 
died in an untimely hour at fifty-seven ! 

Upon the second period, that which I call the 
brawn in his life, these exercises will not permit me 
long to dwell. It bears the journals of twenty years, 
from the raising of the attorney's sign in '37 till he 
gave himself without reclamation to his country at the 
opening of '58. They tell us he was an able lawyer, 
and I can believe that ; but he must have been 
elementary, not learned. They give us good accounts 
of his professional successes ; but other and greater 
scenes make us forget them. The jurisprudence of 
the West in his day has entitled few men to enduring 
distinction. We know, however, that he distinguished 
himself in his own cases, and that he was a favorite 
sought to manage the causes of the clients of others. 
In the Legislature of his State he measured lances 



12 



with the rising Douglas and there for the first time 
caught the gleam of his own future. Once he went 
into Congress, and left it without great distinction, — 
but that should not be counted largely against him. 
Yet it was then that he became considerably known 
in the country. At that time I met him in the 
streets of Worcester. Congress had just adjourned 
when our Whig State Convention assembled here in 
1848. As the chosen head of the city committee of 
the party with which he acted, I had called a public 
meeting in yonder hall for the evening preceding the 
convention and had invited several gentlemen of note 
to make addresses. None of them came. But as the 
sun was descending I was told that Abraham Lincoln, 
member of Congress from Illinois, was stopping at 
one of the hotels in town. ' I had heard of him before 
and at once called upon him and made known my 
wish that he would address the meeting in the even- 
ing, to which he readily assented. I further suggested 
to him that as the party in whose cause we were then 
united was largely in a minority here, and as there 
was an unusual bitterness in the antagonistic politics 
of this community, he should practice much discre- 
tion and leave our side as well in its prospects as he 
could. His benignant eye caught my meaning and 
his gentle spirit responded approval. His address was 
one of the best it has ever been my fortune to hear, 
and left not one root of bitterness behind. Some of 



13 



you will remember all this, but not so distinctly as I 
do. I never saw him afterwards. The next day the 
convention came ; the genius-eloquence of Choate, of 
blessed memory, was applauded to the echo, and the 
stately rhetoric of Winthrop received its reward ; but 
the member from Illinois, though he remained in town 
surrounded by associate congressmen, was that day 
and in that body unknown and unheard. But where 
are they all now, — and where is he, — in the benedic- 
tions of his countrymen, in the gratitude of an 
enfranchised race, in the love of mankind ! 

In 1858, only seven years ago, Mr. Lincoln was 
selected by the Republicans of Illinois as the com- 
petitor of Mr. Douglas for a seat in the Senate of the 
United States. Thus opened the third and last period 
of his life. How strong he was at that time in the 
empire-state of the West, is well shown by his having 
received every vote in a ballot of twelve hundred 
chosen delegates in a state convention. That was the 
hour of his consecration, of his sacramental vow, in 
the service of the country. Then and there he 
became the representative man. And now, after 
reading for the second time his discussions with 
his eminent rival in that canvass, I can declare my 
conviction that to the clear analysis which he con- 
stantly presented of the purposes and the teachings 
of the founders of this government, to the reverence 
with which he impressed the people for the humane 



14 

and benevolent intent of the Constitution, to the 
exalted moral reasons upon which he predicated the 
new coming era, we are more largely indebted, than 
to any other person, for the firm purpose and high 
resolve which, two years later, united and inflamed 
the free states against the further encroachments of 
slavery in this country. You will consider the 
honorable courage of the man in the positions he 
then took. The laws, the traditions, the systems of 
Illinois, her southern geography and settlement, the 
memories and prejudices of her people, were all 
against the theories and humanities which he deter- 
mined in the fear only of God to proclaim. But his 
soul was ablaze with the enthusiasm of a christian 
statesmanship, and he went forth in the panoply of 
immortal truth, which neither the timidity of friends 
could strip from him, nor the darts of opponents could 
penetrate. He sounded at the opening the bugle 
note of omen which rang through the land ; " A 
house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe 
this government cannot permanently endure half 
slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be 
dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do 
expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all 
one thing or all the other." Many elsewhere, some 
there, hesitated over the high doctrine ; large num- 
bers of Republicans in the North were not unwilling 
to see Mr. Douglas successful as a reward for his 



15 

brave contest with Buchanan. I confess that I felt so 
myself. 13ut the newly invested champion looked 
over the fleeting hour and the mere question of a 
senatorial chair, he saw farther than times or localities, 
and pierced beyond the veil which too often shuts off 
administrations from the vision of the beatitudes and 
the ages ; he knew the importance that the banner of 
anew party, which bore the name of Freedom, should 
carry radiant inscriptions, and over all the state, from 
her frozen springs to her Egyptian heats, he upheld 

" Th' imperial ensign, which, full high advanced, 
Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind."' 

By this unwavering fidelity to his convictions, his 
hour having not yet come, under the over-ruling of 
Providence he accomplished both more and less than 
he set out for ; he made his rival Senator, himself 
President, and his country Free. As I look backward 
over the events of that year which he so largely 
controlled ; as I follow him sixty times to the hustings, 
and hear him in language not one word of which, so 
far as I can judge, he would wish to blot, urging those 
lessons which the nation must then have received or 
have passed beneath the yoke of perpetual humilia- 
tion, — as I see him rising from the autumn of '58 to 
the spring of '60 to an ascendency over all others as the 
advocate of the primal principles of a free republic, 
and so recognized across the whole northern belt from 
the great plains to the Atlantic frontier, — I not only 



16 

count him most fortunate of men in the height to 
which all these things soon after conducted him and 
us, but I conclude that if he had gone then to the 
sleep in which he now reposes, he would have been 
embalmed statesman -father of a new dispensation. 
The year eighteen hundred fifty-eight had established 
him. 

" The boundless prairies learned his name, 
His words the mountain echoes knew, 
The Northern breezes swept his fame 
From icy lake to warm bayou." 

Our greatest Olympiad opened in eighteen hundred 
sixty. I need not sketch the preceding or attendant 
circumstances of the convention and the nomination. 
Our first choice was another, and Massachusetts 
followed the fine arts of New York to give it success. 
They have a better and larger way at the West. 
While the men of the East were ciphering at the 
hotels in Chicago, the men of the Mississippi, the 
Ohio, and the Wabash were packing the wigwam and 
filling the square with a myriad of large hearts and 
brazen throats ready to sound another and a loftier 
chant. Their candidate took the votes, and the 
voice of all rose to the sky like a chorus of nature. 
It was the echo of the voice of God. 

Fortunate, providential selection ! Any other 
apparently would have shipwrecked the Ark of the 
Covenant. If you consider how inevitable are the 
jealousies of the West towards the East, to which we 



17 



must always submit and which we must always 
palliate since we cannot prevent or remove them, — 
if, especially, you reflect what a bond of fate that 
Father of Waters is to us all, and how we must keep 
peace and conciliation with those River gods if we 
expect unity, prosperity, and glory, — if you freshly 
remember how, since this war began, the people of 
the West, though their sons were dying in the same 
trenches and in the same hospitals with ours, have 
thought and said that we were reaping the greater 
benefits of the sacrifice, — you will agree with me that 
none but a Western President could have kept our 
armies, our voters, and our hearts united amid the 
afflictions and reverses that have rolled their thunders 
and their floods over us. And so the hand of our 
Fathers' God interposed against our calculations five 
years ago at the city of the Lakes. 

Our departed hero accepted the nomination in 
written words which are a model for practical religion 
and modern statesmanship. In language which shows 
that the spirit of the Most High was upon him he 
wrapped the resolutions around his heart, and in terms 
which should have won every citizen from Key West 
to Richmond he gave himself to the issue now so 
triumphant and so sad. It was an issue worthy of 
the best days of any nation. As he received it from 
the convention that framed it, and as he stated it in 
his letter of acceptance, it was a system of policy and 



18 

statesmanship which Daniel Webster even on that 
memorable seventh of March would have rejoiced to 
acknowledge, which Henry Clay in any of his later and 
brilliant years would have gladly made resound as out 
of a trumpet from the borders of Virginia through the 
length of Kentucky to the River. It was a broad and 
generous platform, — such as Jefferson would have 
decorated with an hundred theses of his philosox^hy, — 
such as Washington would have stood upon and in- 
voked the blessings of the Almighty. And I have 
the honor to say here, — to be sure it is now after the 
fulfillment of the declarations and the prophesies, — 
that if Abraham Lincoln had not felt warranted 
to justify and stand upon the Resolutions, then the 
North American republic was not deserving of salva- 
tion. But he thought, as we thought, that there was 
a divinity in the impending struggle, and we entered 
upon it together, all of us rejoicing to have such a 
leader, and he only too willing to stake his life on the 
support of such friends and on such a sublime 
restoration and reconstruction of nationality. 

He was chosen ; the men in the South of our 
country had decided that he should be chosen, and 
that the precipitation of their designs should attend 
with equal promptness the humanity and patriotism 
of the North. The work of secession began at the 
instant, and before the President elect had reached 
the Capital so many of the slave states had already 



19 

declared themselves out of the Union as to make it 
certain that nearly all the others intended to follow. 
Thousrh Buchanan had remained in office four months 

o 

since the election, — let the curtain drop over all that 
he did and over all that he neglected to do, and let 
us behold the new President approaching the frowning 
scene which confronted him. 

Such work was his as no man had ever put hand to. 
A nation was dissolving, and half its territory was 
bristling with the arms of revolt. In the loyal sections 
there was universal despondency, and among those 
upon whom he must rely there was every variety of 
counsel, from that which would permit the wayward 
sisters to depart in peace, to that which would thrust 
the arm of the government in the moment of its 
greatest weakness against the thick bosses of a 
rebellion of thirty years preparation. The Czar, the 
Emperor, the King, would marshal and march out his 
army and crush insurgency before the next moon ; 
but the constitutional republic had no army. Foreign 
nations caught at the defect in a moment as fatal to 
our existence, and adapted their own policy to the 
expectation of seeing the North American Union 
disappear like a dream. In the general gloom which 
shut down over the whole horizon good men every- 
where were ready to exclaim, hail, holy light, — if 
only it might come from any quarter. What kind of 
statesmanship, or learning, or experience, could make 



20 

a magistrate equal to such a work ? Diplomacy could 
not save the flag then, eloquence could not start a 
throb beneath the ribs of that death, an arm of flesh 
could not hold a charm over the engulfing waters and 
the dismantling ship. History, civilization, nay, 
almost the mercies of Heaven, we thought, were 
baffled in that day. Again, then, I ask, what kind of 
a President was needed, and would prove best 
appointed ] You know how, for many months, before 
this man had got rightly into the work, and before we 
could properly measure him, some of you sighed for 
a Jackson and others for a Webster to take the helm ; 
yet we now all believe that we have had the man 
raised up by God for this particular epoch, that few 
could have accomplished this mission at all, and none 
so well. 

For he came to it devout, wise, patient, forecasting, 
and rich with insight. I read his Inaugural as a key 
to his whole policy for this strange time, and there I 
discern the dawn of the lustre of his qualities for 
administration, which blended a certain lloman firm- 
ness with a Christian mediatorial talent. His wisdom 
began in this, that he knew he could not foresee all 
that might happen, and so he would gather the arms 
of his countrymen around him, and would keep step 
with the majestic marches of Providence. Never 
doubting that our jurisdiction would be recovered, 
always believing the conflict would be long and 



21 

varied, he promised just enough to keep the element 
of hope uppermost in the country, and not too much 
to unfit the masses for their own great part. Clay or 
Webster in his chair might have restored the old 
Union a little sooner, with the loss of the moral sense 
of the world and with the cost of another revolt 
hereafter ; Jackson might have struck quicker and 
heavier blows, but an untimely blow then, might have 
shivered this Union like glass. Our man had that 
tact and knowledge of men which only his training 
could have imparted. He knew his own West, and 
kept his hand constantly on her pulse ; he was in 
sympathy with the conscience of the East, and honored 
her culture and power ; and by his cultivation of the 
one and the other he kept them both in harmonious 
action to the end. The ancient countries affected 
delight and amusement at the sight of this son of the 
prairies succeeding to the work of kings and putting 
his hand to an undertaking which comprised the 
destinies of a hemisphere. They could not under- 
stand that the question he had to deal with could 
receive little aid from state-craft or the previous 
education of a public man. They could not believe 
that new men are best for great crises ; that for 
such a ruler and for such a period Bunyan is a better 
master than all the Georges, and iEsop a keener 
teacher than both the Walpoles ; that in a trial of 
the national spirit and the national forces involving 



22 

the issue of death at once or life perpetual to a nation, 
the study of Washington is higher than the schools ; 
that in such an emergency a single Cromwell is 
greater than a dozen earls out of Eton and Oxford. 
They forgot the consolations of their own history ; 
that Marlborough had never read Xenophon, or later 
martial historians, but somehow managed to triumph 
over veteran armies of France ; that Wellington was 
counted dull in his early life, and rose to victory and 
fame only by the buffet of trial ; and they did not 
stop to consider that Lincoln might ascend as con- 
spicuously, and bring with him a Grant, a Sherman, 
a Sheridan, as quickly and as triumphantly. All 
history, all examples, all instructions are at fault in 
revolutions ; and our enemies at home and abroad 
were making mockery of the mysteries of providential 
interpositions all along the century-processions of 
mankind, when they hesitated about our success 
because our chief had no title save that which the 
Almighty had given him, no signet save that of the 
cabin, no learning save that to which the evening 
torch and the celestial orbs had lighted him. But he 
disappointed them all, passed beyond the boundaries 
they had set for him, within four years, the shortest 
space ever illustrated by such distinction, triumphed 
over a civil war of imperial proportions, and left a 
name to be recorded and repeated in the courts of 
St. Louis, St. James, and St. Peter, among the inscrip- 



tions of a thousand years past and to come. 80 
simple and rudimental in his origin and preparation, 
not learned by the side of the masters, and not 
ignorant of himself, he came to a supremacy over the 
grandest epic of all countries and gave triumphant 
direction to the greatest war of human annals. It 
will be the task of the historian and biographer to 
classify and present these high themes hereafter, but 
a few words ought to be said about them now over 
his new-made grave. 

Having neither the taste nor the education of a 
soldier, he so practised his intuitions as to become 
master of the field of war. If you consider how 
extended and complicated the objective field soon 
became, and how in consultation and oversight he was 
its director, it must occur to you in reading his 
correspondence with the commanders, that his 
perceptions were clear and his judgment elementary 
and profound. How many toilsome and anxious 
hours he passed in the war department, and how well 
he understood all that was transpiring and all that 
ought to transpire, is made apparent in the letters he 
himself wrote to Gen. McClellan during the fifteen 
months of his command. Head them and re-read 
them and you will agree that they evince, in a 
remarkable degree for a civilian, the military sense. 
Having committed to that officer an army of eight 
scores of the flower of the land, he followed 



24 

it with an interest alike parental and patriotic, 
studying the map of its marches and its hopes, 
breasting back while he could the impatience of the 
country, at all times suggesting his advice kindly to its 
chief, and finally, in those dark days which have made 
the name of the Chickahominy historical, transmitting 
a series of dispatches from his own pen which could 
not have been better if he had possessed the genius 
of a soldier. He saw through the objective and the 
consequential of campaigns quite as clearly and quite 
as far as most of the generals who wore his stars. 
Under the pressure of military repulses he rose large 
as the occasion, and when his commanders were 
changing their base he held hopefully to his own. 
When retreat and disintegration had destroyed the 
last chance of entering Richmond that season, and 
his chieftain called many times again for reinforce- 
ments, he telegraphed back a volume of present 
history and future destiny in a few short, sharp, kind, 
hopeful words : " If we had a million of men we could 
not get them to you in time. We have not the men. 
If you are not strong enough to face the enemy, * * * 
save the army at all events, even if you fall back to 
Fort Monroe. We still have strength enough m the 
country, AND WILL BRING IT OUT." He had a large 
power of patience, which this war required. The 
people of the North demanded a change of generals 
after each misfortune, but he saw difficulties they 



25 

could not see, and tried one after the other long and 
tolerantly till he found the right one. That is the 
highest proof of administrative talent, in war, which 
disregards a clamor, rejects instrumentalities only 
after they have been exhausted, and feels its way 
along the rounds of failure till it finds the choice 
that can sound the awful charge of victory. And 
though his arch-rival at Richmond had the consum- 
mate education and prestige of a soldier, the murmurs 
which swelled from his councils and his fields against 
him had double the volume of those which rose to 
the ears of your President from the fretful loyalty of 
the North ; and I venture the prediction, that if that 
history can ever be fully written, as ours will be, in 
military comprehension and appreciation, in that gift 
of insight which is the product of nature quite as 
much as of art or the academy, which reduces the 
involutions of armies and campaigns to simplicity and 
analysis, even in this, all this, which belongs to arms, 
our plain civilian will be proved to have outwitted 
the other, educated soldier though he was. 

Then I cannot help thinking that, as a part of the 
military questions he had to treat, there were such 
grave matters of what I may call legislative jurispru- 
dence as had not been thought of before. To weaken 
the rebellion by the destruction of its civil rights, 
and this alike for purposes of punishment to treason 
and of strength to loyalty, — this, under our Constitu- 



26 

tion which never contemplated such a crisis as the 
present, and under the mutual relations of national 
and state sovereignty, the delicacy of which had not 
been apprehended until now, required a statesmanship 
scarcely less than judicial. Would Heaven that our 
own Webster could have lived for this, to have sat as 
premier by the side of Lincoln, to have illustrated 
with unprecedented effect his colossal gifts ! It was 
a great thought — of withdrawing from half a people 
the rights of a national citizenship and of indefeasible 
republican immunities. The Congress and the 
President did not altogether agree. This is not the 
time to decide between them. Congress spoke the 
policy of prompt and final deliverance from the 
hateful aristocracy whose alleged rights, if not utterly 
extinguished in war, might prove a clog to Freedom 
and Nationality in peace. The President endeavored 
to blend and reconcile the supposed elements of the 
discordant rights of rebels under the Constitution 
and of loyalty in war. I only allude to the subject 
to call your attention to the depth of the matter 
which underlay the military policy of the administra- 
tion, and to solicit your attention to the message of 
President Lincoln, July, 1862, in which, while he 
deferred in modesty to the representatives of the 
people, he stood upon his own responsibility, displayed 
in bold relief the abilities of a technical lawyer and a 
constitutional jurist. There has been no better 



27 

passage in his life by which he could have illustrated 
his capacity for the comprehensive field of an inter- 
state and national war. 

And then I reckon it another striking feature of 
his military administration, that under all circum- 
stances he took accountability and censure to himself. 
We may acknowledge, once for all, that there was a 
modest, conscious power in that; for no empirical 
experimentalist would have trusted himself to such a 
test, and the man must be well grounded in the 
popular confidence who can bear it. Point me' to any 
one person in the British administration who was 
willing to stand out solitary and responsible when the 
people criticised the campaigns of their generals in 
the Peninsula of Spain or the Crimea. Rather than 
that, the responsibility could only be found distributed 
among the unknown and mystical impersonalities of 
the Cabinet and the Privy Council. Your President 
on the other hand sought no shelter from criticism. 
In the first year of the war, when Congress passed a 
vote of censure upon one of his Department Secre- 
taries, he sent them a message assuming the 
responsibility to himself ; Jackson would have done 
the same, but no other man since his day. In the 
second year, when another Secretary of War was 
arraigned by large numbers of the people for having 
enforced the failure of McClellan in the Peninsula 
by withholding reinforcements, Mr. Lincoln came 



28 

gallantly to the response and claimed that the attack 
should be pointed against his own breast; and his 
dispatches to that General, since published, show that 
he could well afford to receive the attack. He wrote 
his own messages, generally directed his commanders, 
not regularly consulted his cabinet, and, I believe, 
frequently over-ruled them when he did. He felt 
that he was personally accountable to the people for 
the triumphant defence of the Union. He, and no 
other, before his election, and in his inaugural, had 
drawn the outlines within which the glory of his 
country might be found, and now like a wise man he 
relied on his own prayerful study and on his own keen 
instincts for ability to fill out the outlines with the 
colors that shall give eternal beauty to the picture of 
united America. In this I admire equally his 
magnanimity and his courage. Fortunate for us, that 
he was willing to take such responsibility. Many 
and many a time, when cypress instead of laurel 
bound the eagles of the army, happy and hopeful 
were we all if only we might believe that Mr. Lincoln 
had ordered the risk and the shock ; we cared little 
for his ministers, but we trusted unsuspectingly in 
him ; when our reproaches rose almost to mutiny in 
the North, if only he would say, in me, in me vertite 
tela, from that moment as by a charm the tumult 
subsided. It is a great relief in the discouragements 
and troubles of war, to rest upon the one man who is 



29 

above all the others ; it is a greater thing if that man 
can justify and warrant such a rest and solace. In 
this power of impressment is a good part of a ruler's 
greatness. And thus we trace to him even the 
brilliant conduct of others ; for since he willed it, 
they performed it. It is the eulogy of Lincoln to say 
that much which others performed he suggested and 
was willing to be held responsible for it. Said the 
ablest of Englishmen : " The minister who does those 
things is a great man — but the king who desires that 
they should be done, is a far greater." 

How can I within the limits of these remarks speak 
fitly or sufficiently of the part he bore in the cause of 
emancipation 1 Think what height and depth stood 
in the way, how history and providence only shed 
darkness over his approaches, how the free states 
were rent by conflicting opinions, how he had to 
institute a new policy, which, if it might succeed, 
would invest the government with immortal life, but 
if it should fail, would wreck the nation and shroud 
his own name in ignominy forevermore. It was a 
necessity which he had not anticipated. It took 
fifteen months of war to discover the strength of the 
rebellion and the weakness of the government, and 
when the alternative came at length it presented 
sombre and frightful proportions. To destroy slavery 
he had not been elected, nor for that had he called 
the people to arms ; the only duty for him, and that 



30 

which he judged most pleasing to God, was to save 
this Union from dissolution. You remember how 
after our flag had begun to trail in defeat, voices here 
and there raised this issue upon him in terms alike 
beseeching and threatening. Still what could he do 
better or more than balance the conflict of magisterial 
ethics, study the contradictory omens of the sky, feel 
the heart of his country, and search after the will of 
the last arbiter ? Undoubtedly, he thought the neces- 
sity of emancipation might come, probably it would 
come ; but it would come as a question of arms and 
must be supported by public opinion. That was the 
day of all which tried him as a statesman. 

In the presence of such a question, large enough 
to occupy the thoughts and agitations of a generation, 
behold the unambitious practical statesmanship of 
Abraham Lincoln. No age has been blessed with a 
better. We are constantly looking back through the 
coloring medium of distance to the brilliant lights of 
the past, and desponding over the present and the 
future. But the statesmen of one age are unfitted 
for the requirements of another. Peel was as great 
for his time as Chatham or Bolingbroke for theirs. 
From the magnificent success of our late President we 
have learned the right definition of a wise ruler. If 
it be his labor to initiate a measure that shall stand 
out among the beneficent acts that mark historical 
periods, it is his still more painful and vexatious work 



31 



to commend it to public approval ; he has to enlighten 
the ignorance of some, and to convince the intelli- 
gence of others ; he has to combat honest prejudices, 
and modify interested opposition ; if he would move 
with strength and certainty towards the success which 
is ahead, he has to halt in his steps, and clip his 
propositions, and qualify his words, and emasculate his 
theories ; if he would be strong to place his country 
among the positions his genius has pictured for her, 
he must apparently enfeeble his policy to conciliate 
one class and clog it with burdens to satisfy another. 
The modern statesman must combine patient temper, 
persevering will, and sound knowledge of men ; he 
must discern the present tone and probable direction 
of public opinion; he must distinguish between 
intelligent and unintelligent censure, and he must 
know how much of public outcry can safely be disre- 
garded, as well as that amount which he cannot afford 
to withstand. 

Such statesmanlike qualities Mr. Lincoln illustrated 
in those many months of hesitation, anxiety, seeming 
then almost inability to act, which ushered in that 
day on which he emerged from his closet, bearing in 
his own arms the effulgent guidon of emancipation. 
I religiously believe that he was right, all along, from 
the stammering beginning to the clarion-like finality. 
You goaded him too soon, too often, and too long : he 
was the while in consultation with the counsellors 



32 



around him, with his little learning and his large reflec- 
tion, with all of history he had read, with the fathers 
and the prophets. While editors and orators stirred 
strife and commotion in the country and in the Senate 
Chamber over his long withholding of the decree, he 
continued impassive in his purpose, and remembered 
that one of the instructive characters in his favorite 
Bunyan was " a grave and beautiful damsel named 
Discretion." And so I conceive that he was right 
upon this . question in that which some of us thought 
his dalliance with the states of the border, right also 
when he countermanded Fremont's military order of 
freedom — right again when he recalled the similar 
rescript of Hunter, — right as well in his letter to Mr. 
Greeley, — and right at last when the angels an- 
nounced the hour and he sent forth the Decree of 
Emancipation triumphant and irrevocable while the 
earth shall stand. Then he said : " I have done this 
after a very full deliberation, and under a very heavy 
and solemn sense of responsibility. I can only trust 
in God I have made no mistake. It is now for the 
country and the world to pass judgment." 

Yes, yes, that judgment his country and the world 
have already passed. His returning armies share 
their laurels with him and pay their resounding 
fusilade over the turf which covers their father 
and their friend ! But higher honors await him ! 
A nation rescued from the tyranny whose roots 



33 



have spread over two centuries, never relenting, 
never appeased, a race delivered from thraldom and 
elevated to the hopes of civilization and Christianity, 
shall walk to the beat of peaceful marches about 
his tomb till the resurrection ! And wherever 
Freedom shall have a home, or America a name, 
or Washington a praise, over the whole globe, 
mankind shall revere the memory of him who 
sealed the baptism of emancipation with his own 
blood ! 

And I desire for myself to express the opinion 
that no monument that may be erected to com- 
memorate his name can rise so high or endure so 
long, as that whose foundations shall be laid in 
those immutable and universal rights of man for 
which he gave his life. As the emancipation of 
four millions became the necessity of his policy 
for the preservation of the Union, so let us extend 
to the emancipated race all the rights of citizenship 
if we would make our safety certain and final. 
If under a democratic government universal suffrage 
is worth anything in the North, then is universal 
suffrage a paramount necessity in the South. Is 
it republican, democratic or safe, to exclude from 
the polls a majority of the loyal population of the 
Southern States ? Your sons have been maimed 
and slain in vain, if the aristocracy which was the 
cause and support of the war shall not be shorn 



34 

of every distinction, if the oligarchy shall not 
have its roots plucked to their uttermost fibre out 
of the land. 

I do not forget to-day that probably one-half of all 
those who now help to extend the funeral train, have 
at one time or another in four years pronounced their 
complaint that Mr. Lincoln was too much the follower, 
not sufficiently the leader of public opinion. The stern 
tribunal of history adjusts all such accounts as that. 
The immortal Washington opened his mission at 
Cambridge under the same necessities of limitation 
that have bounded the horizon of Lincoln. Pie entered 
the war in advance of the issue, and had to await the 
developments of events which made separation and 
independence the sublime ultimatum. I concede 
that the late President waited on public opinion ; and 
when you reflect how abnormal and stupendous was 
the cause he had to manage, I will thank you to 
tell me if waiting on public opinion was not waiting 
on Providence itself. Tell me, if the success or loss 
of the whole, to us and to distant generations, did not 
depend on the spirit of the people. Public sentiment 
is the arbiter of republican destinies. But public 
sentiment, — what is it here with us but the product, 
not precisely the average quantity, but the result and 
the product of the intuitions, instincts, sagacities, and 
reflections of the millions of America, — the crystali- 
zation of the myriad forces of democracy, — to be 



35 



ascertained by the President only after incessant labor, 
and study, and retrospection, — then, when with 
satisfactory certainty ascertained, to be not only con- 
sulted, but to be received and accepted as in the nature 
of inspiration and decree to the magistrate. He who 
keeps pace with this requistion is neither quite a leader 
nor quite a follower, but a representative, adminis- 
trator, and executor, — all and everything which a 
democratic constitution will ask for or can permit. 
Mr. Lincoln understood and adopted this construction 
of statesmanship better than I can analyze it. He 
sought neither to lead public opinion, nor consented 
to follow it. No man could with greater force or 
justice than he could, repeat the remark which 
Edmund Burke made in his own justification to his 
constituents, — that he did not follow public opinion, 
but only went out to meet it on the way. This alone 
gave your President his power. I do not forget that 
there are occasions in which the statesman, like the 
leader in the field, may organize and direct the strat- 
egic movements of public action. But in the march of 
civilization, issues ripen, events come, and men advance 
to the conflict. A man, an accident, a trifle, hastens 
or retards the battle, but the single man does not 
make the revolution nor quell the storm. In the 
significant epochs of history or final clash of arms, 
the statesman can discern the occasions, the opportu- 
nities, and the necessities of the hour, but his greatness 



36 



and glory are largely the product of the times. An 
English journalist has just said of the lamented Mr. 
Cobden, that " his limitations as a statesman con- 
stituted his greatness as a representative thinker." I 
like the expression and the philosophy of it. I could 
coin no better phrase with which to define the wise 
statesmanship of Mr. Cobden's friend on this side of 
the water. Seeking not to transcend his limitations 

AS A statesman, HE MADE HIMSELF THE REPRESENTA- 
TIVE THINKER OF HIS COUNTRY AND HIS TIME. That 

is his glory to-day, and can never become his weakness 
or his shame. Of course such an understanding of 
the policy and the duty of a national magistrate 
subjects him, as Mr. Lincoln for a time was subjected, 
to the imputation of over-cautious timidity ; but a 
just posterity, nay, the sagacious present generation, 
will expunge the criticism and open to him the 
pathway to justice. So, if I remember correctly, the 
policy of Fabius was by some called cowardice, or at 
least timidity, in his day ; but I believe it prepared 
the way for the avenging armies of Scipio. So, as I 
have read, the venerable Washington was characterized 
and criticised in his time also ; but I have the 
impression that Yorktown, and the Constitution, and 
eight years of magisterial glory, constituted his vindi- 
cation. So, as I have observed, Lincoln was summoned 
to submit to the same test of fame ; and so we all see 
this day that his name ascends henceforth among the 
stars. 



37 

His speech, though not uniform, was not unworthy 
of his action. Consider how opposite are the 
requisitions in this respect which empires make upon 
their rulers, and take the two leading powers of the 
East and the West for the illustration. The Czar of 
Eussia, — blessed be his fortunes evermore for that 
early and timely friendship which he bestowed upon 
our country and our President, when the cabinets on 
either shore of the fitful and vengeful Channel offered 
us only the scowling welcome of intimidation and 
hypocrisy, — to whom, some day, in the alternations of 
our inter-nationalities, the shade of assassinated inno- 
cence shall stalk in terror and retribution over all the 
seas they arrogate ; that Czar of Russia, all the way 
from Peter or Catharine to the latest Alexander, 
wields dominion with action and without words. That 
is the condition of his rule, nor is it our business or 
our pleasure to find fault with it there. The genius 
of America is another. Here the President is the 
selected agent of the people, and must respond when- 
ever they call for his reasons. No President before 
Lincoln ever had so many and such calls. They came 
from Congress, from every State, from associations, 
from delegations, from individual men, from sponta- 
neous assemblages under a hundred moon-lights on 
the lawn around the Executive mansion. He had a 
word for them all. True it is, he had still that greatest 
gift of a magistrate, the power of reticence, the 



38 

masterly talent of suppression, whenever the occasion 
required it. He let them off with his joke and his 
western wit, whenever that was all they ought to have. 
In this sometimes, and too frequently, he reduced the 
dignity of his office ; but it was the relief-valve which 
he had received from his Maker Yet, beside all this, 
so many were his necessities of public speaking, that 
no one of his predecessors had been tried in that way 
so often. He spoke good things from the windows of 
the White House, as he had spoken them before on 
the prairies. They shall be handed over to you and 
your children, and you shall say that I do not praise 
them too highly. You shall find some shade and 
beauty beneath their pine and oaken leaves. You 
shall say that he spoke and wrote with much of the 
simplicity, quaintness and power of Franklin, and the 
elemental mastery of our tongue. Many were his 
occasional speeches, and one of them at least will 
be imperishable for its felicity and brevity. Lord 
Macaulay assures us that barrister Somers in a speech 
of five minutes in the Court of King's Bench estab- 
lished the enduring fame of an orator. Mr. Lincoln 
by a speech of only that duration at Gettysburg 
divided the honors of the day with the transcendent 
Everett, and inscribed his name on the tombstone of 
every soldier whose ashes there await the rising of 
the quick and the dead. His state papers are more 
lasting than these. His messages to Congress have 



39 

already passed into the national literature ; they were 
read at the time in the courts of France and England ; 
and though they may have been obliterated or 
obscured there by royal art, they will reappear for 
luminous and prophetic reading when Europe and 
America shall settle their accounts. 

In these state papers posterity will recognize a 
style of power that is not more unique in its form 
than in its produced effect. It is in sympathy with 
the national characteristics and with the traditional 
choice of the people. His mind was acute, logical, 
and subtle ; and that they appreciate. In the time of 
her casuistry and refinement the public teachers of 
Greece found no heartier reception than wit and 
reason find now in America from Maine to Nevada. 
Mr. Lincoln had studied the first and second sight of 
his countrymen, till he could address them with a 
direction that seldom failed. Then he secured their 
favor, and I may say pleased their senses, by a 
genialty and humor which smoothed their asperities, 
conquered their prejudices, and attracted their hearts 
to him and his cause. Even in the winter of their 
discontent, when arms were unsuccessful and taxes 
were high, he led them as through the gorgeousness 
and serenity of an Indian summer, to new campaigns, 
and heavier burdens, and coming victories. From '62 
to '64 such was the power of his written and spoken 
words. In statement and argument he struck deeper 



40 

and richer veins than his supposed education would 
have suggested. I think we are quite apt to be in 
error as to this whole matter of education. When 
and where did Hamilton acquire his 1 — for he left 
college a boy, before his time, and saw no schools 
afterwards save the camp, the cabinet, and the bar ; 
yet he proved the finest intellect of his time. Inform 
me, if you can, whence came the education of Lincoln, 
who never trod the floors of a college. I only know 
that we do not know what may have been his study 
in a lazy, unlimited, unconditioned western life. I 
do know, what he stated when last he was in New 
England five years ago, on the eve and in the expec- 
tation of his honors, that, after he had tried the study 
of the law and had found himself cornered, he went 
into retirement for some months and studied Euclid 
till he understood it from root to outermost branch. 
And so doubtless he went through more than we 
know of the struggle and ecstacy of educating himself. 
However that may have been, and whenever or 
wherever he may have acquired the power, you and I 
know that he could reason with a straightforwardness 
and incisiveness which Harvard or Princeton might 
be proud to honor. This is not the extravaganza of 
eulogy ; peruse, as I have perused, his written and 
spoken addresses, from Illinois in '58 to his last and 
singular Inaugural, and you shall say the same. I 
will not particularize out of them all, save one. Take 



41 

up and read critically his published letter to Erastus 
Corning and his committee, covering the whole 
question of the suspension of the habeas corpus and 
the subjection of the civil to military law, and it shall 
be your impartial judgment that in a broad statement 
of public safety and historical law it is not unworthy 
of Plamilton ; in purity and legitimacy of style it is 
scarcely inferior to the papers of the same master ; 
and in just comprehensiveness and ingenuous patri- 
otism it would reflect credit upon the tender heart 
and robust nationalism of AVashington. I admired it 
when it first appeared, and now after a second and 
third reading I think it to be the best of all his 
papers. 

The moral and humane qualities of the good Presi- 
dent set off and gilded his term. Did you ever know 
a potentate whose rule bore such blazonry of events, 
civic and martial, and whose daily life was so simple, 
plain and temperate 1 I believe that not Sir Matthew 
Hale kept sterner vigil over private and official hours, 
over the shrine of the domestic sanctuary. Success 
was his aim and duty his guide, and he saw little time 
for display, or amusement, or ostentation. In four 
years of labor, which would have broken like a reed 
any man of less iron cast, he not once got time to 
revisit the state and city of his love, seldom left the 
capital unless to visit the tents, hospitals or graves 
of his soldiers, and once only came so far as the 



42 



North to consult on the national safety with a retired 
chieftain. He gave attentive ear to humblest men 
and women, was as faithful in small acts of kindness 
as in great acts of justice, as amiable in little things 
in private as in high matters of state. 

His magnanimity became proverbial. His soul was 
no nursery for a brood of resentments. He conferred 
the bars, and stars, and eagles of war generously 
upon those who had not given him a vote or a 
sympathy, if only they were true to the flag. He 
bared his own breast to the brunt of many an assault 
aimed at Cameron, or Stanton, or McClellan, allowed 
them the honors, and took to himself the swarming 
reproaches. In a serenade on the evening after his 
second election, when the impassioned majority would 
have dishonored the name of his rival, he spoke for 
him grand words of charity and justice. A specific 
instance of his truthful magnanimity I must unfold to 
you, as it has been related to me upon the best of 
authority. On a certain morning many months before 
Chief Justice Taney died, his immediate decease was 
pronounced in Washington as certain. In antici- 
pation of the supposed impending death our senior 
senator called upon Mr. Lincoln and discussed with 
him the importance of appointing Mr. Chase to fill 
the expected vacancy. The President at length gave 
the assurance, But the Chief Justice renewed his 
lease of life, and many months lapsed away. Mean- 



43 

while, between Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Chase, in the 
council of administration, divergences arose. At 
length in July, '64, the latter laid the key of the 
exchequer upon the President's table. He accepted 
the resignation without hesitation. Then came 
Senators to his room to urge the re-appointment or 
restoration of Mr. Chase to the Treasury, — for that 
juncture reflected dark shadows over our finances. 
" No, no," said Mr. Lincoln, '' for between him and 
me there is an incompatibility for the same council. 
But this, you will bear in mind, would not prevent 
me from honoring Mr. Chase in any other high sphere 
of the government." Half a year afterwards the 
Chief Justice died, but not before Mr. Chase had 
sprinkled along his travels in New England sharp 
and disparaging words of criticism upon the President. 
And yet the same President, faithful to his promise 
and his duty, forgetful of wrong and injustice to 
himself, conferred npon his late secretary the appoint- 
ment, and placed the jurisprudence of the United 
States and the rights of human nature under perpetual 
obligations to his magnanimity. 

He believed in God. You know how he left his 
home for Washington in February, '61, in his parting 
words requesting that his neighbors would array in 
his support the mysterious power of the legions of 
prayer ; and after he had assumed his high trust at 
the Capital he cultivated that religious life which is 



44 

the best guaranty of a nation's triumph. While war, 
according to its prescriptive laws, opened all the 
avenues of inconsideration and levity to others, he 
drew his consolations and refreshed his courage at 
the never-failing fountains of divine mercy. It was 
this, added to his humorous and sunny views, which 
bore him upward and onward through such a regime 
of four years as never had been allotted to a head 
that wore a crown. And therefore all the people 
believed in him. More distinctly than any other 
President since Washington he irradiated the official 
pathway at all times and in all places with the 
conspicuous publicity of Christian ethics. When 
Canning in Parliament opposed the humanity of 
slavery-abolition, he declared in classic words that 
it was impracticable to apply to politics those pure 
abstract principles which are indispensable to the 
excellence of private ethics. That was English, and 
almost worthy of a court whose official philanthropy 
is now proved to have been another name for the 
ambition of commercial and political ascendency. 
Accordingly Great Britain could not conceal surprise 
at the novelty of Mr. Lincoln's theory of Christian 
ethics as a rule for official conduct ; and the diiference 
between us will have to be postponed to the adjust- 
ments which are yet to come of American and 
European ideas. 

Your President was kind and tender to a fault. 



45 

This led him into some mistakes, but his magnanimity 
corrected them. So he yielded somewhat to the rebel 
Campbell at Richmond, and gave what might have 
proved a fatal order to Weitzel, but revoked it on the 
last day of his life when he discovered his error. I 
suspect, that if he had lived for the reconstruction, 
he would have made several such mistakes ; but I 
know that he would have rectified and retrieved them. 
I do not think he would have executed the traitor 
who set up as his rival for histoiy, but I trust that 
his successor will. Yet, after all, as the morning of 
victory opened on his sight, and as the hour of his 
own translation drew nigh, I love to recur to the 
benignity of his purposes towards the most wicked 
of men. In his last consultation with his cabinet, a 
few hours before his departure, his heart melted 
before the appalling claims of Justice. I think, 
however, he only meant to say : — 

" I shall temper so 
Justice with Mercy, as may illustrate 
Them fully satisfied, and then appease." 

Nay, more, I catch the language of his last Inaugural 
for his eulogy : — " with malice toward none, with 
CHARITY FOR ALL." Lofty words ! He knew not what 
those men had in preparation for him, and the Lord 
in his infinite mercy was preparing him to go at their 
bidding, whispering as he ascended, "Father, forgive 
them, for they know not what they do ! " 



46 



As you look backward along the galleries of 
history, you are surprised when you think how few 
are found whose fame has outlived their period or 
country, how few have passed into the constellations 
of immortal light. Those only are privileged with 
that imperishable distinction whose record gleams 
forth above the wreck of contemporary annals, whose 
labors place an entire nation, or many generations, 
or all mankind, under the remembrance of debt 
and obligation. To that judgment, ubiquitous and 
everlasting, Washington passed sixty-five years ago. 
From that day to ours, out of the long list of 
American Presidents, however marked their own 
talent or their own period, no one of them all before 
has, in the full sense of universal humanity and fame, 
given special dignity, or unlimited praise, or immortal 
renown, to America through time and space. But 
such has been the mission of Abraham Lincoln. 
However we should have estimated him four years 
ago as to the limitation of his previous life, or his 
natural parts, or his acquired culture, now that the 
four years have passed it has become apparent that 
Almighty God had selected him for world-wide honor 
and benignity. 

I appropriate to him the language of our own 
fellow-citizen and historian, Mr. Motley, which he 
applied to William of Orange : 

"No man was ever more devoted to a high purpose: 



47 



no man had ever more right to imagme himself, or 
less inclination to pronounce himself, entrusted with 
a divine mission. There was nothing of the charlatan 
in his character. His nature was true and steadfast. 
No narrow-minded usurper was ever more loyal to 
his own aggrandizement, than this large-hearted man 
to the cause of oppressed humanity. Yet it was 
inevitable that baser minds should fail to recognize 
his purity. It was natural for grovelling natures 
to search in the gross soil of self-interest for the 
sustaining roots of the tree beneath whose branches 
a nation found its shelter. What could they compre- 
hend of living fountains or of heavenly dews 1 " 

But his untimely hour had come. You remember 
the fatal evening only too well already, and I do not 
desire to disturb your sensibilities by anything more 
than this allusion to it. In our poetry, and art, and 
annals, that fourteenth of April shall henceforth be 
known and remembered as the noche triste — the 
sorrowful night. The just and good magistrate then 
went away out of our sight. 

The flag on spire, pinnacle, and cottage, had 
scarcely been restored from its depression of mourn- 
ing, nor the muffled drum had ceased to beat, when 
the rival of the dead, the representative cause of our 
sorrows, was overtaken by retribution. He enjoys 
this evening his reflections upon history, and provi- 
dence, and judgment^ in the hospitality of the noblest 



48 

Fortress of the Union, on a bed around which the 
shade of the murdered President would fain marshal 
"angels and ministers of grace" to protect him. Who 
in all the earth cares now what shall become of him 1 
But whenever, or wherever, or however his time shall 
terminate, between him and the vile dust to which he 
shall descend there is only the brief hour of the life 
of a criminal, to be succeeded by the reproaches of 
his contemporary countrymen, North and South, the 
heavy-pressing judgments of all posterity and of the 
eternal God. No matter when, or where, or how 
Jefferson Davis shall die, — his death cannot be less 
ignominious than that of the assassin who performed 
his purpose, — and all generations shall welcome him 
to the immortality of the representative Traitor of the 
race ! 

But another guerdon awaits our president. He 
sought to save, not to destroy. He labored to uphold 
the pillars of the Temple whose grace and beauty, if 
magistrates prove faithful, can never decay. He 
studied policy and wisdom day and night in a civil 
war which cost him his life, that his country might 
live, and fought treason on every line and in every 
trench over half the states, that democratic govern- 
ment in America might shine forth to cheer and 
animate and guide mankind to the remotest bounds 
of the world and of time. He ransomed four millions 
of his own countrymen from the thraldom of two 



49 

hundred years, and died under the blow of slavery 
in the ecstacy of the sight. No matter when, or 
where, or how death should come to him, — for 
Abraham Lincoln has completed the wtJl^k which 
George Washington began, — to his victories, great 
and unapproachable, he has added such triumphs as 
war never contemplated before, — to the broad field 
of HIS civic glory he has imparted a still broader 
radiance ; — and he now goes from our presence into 
the presence of other ages, garlanded with the double 
honor of Restorer and Liberator ! 



_B S '12 



